More than a decade ago, Intel ran into an issue trying to deliver what was to be the world's top-ranked supercomputer: it looked possible that its new Pentium Pro processors at the heart of the system might not arrive in time. As a result, the chipmaker made an unusual move by paying Hewlett-Packard $100,000 to evaluate building the system using its PA-RISC processors in the machine, said Paul Prince, now Dell's chief technology officer for enterprise products but then Intel's system architect for the supercomputer. Called ASCI Red and housed at Sandia National Laboratories, it was designed to be the first supercomputer to cross the threshold of a trillion math calculations per second.

No itanium was never supposed to provide decent X86 execution, if anything it was more focused on PA-RISC compatibility.

Sorry, but you're wrong. The Itanium was supposed to be the end-all and be-all. Go back and read the industry pundits pronouncements between the initial announcement and the first release.

If x86 performance didn't matter, they wouldn't have wasted precious silicon on it - however, it was supposed to be "good enough" but, by the time the chips were shipping, it simply wasn't.

And even during the height of the Opteron, Intel was still selling more P4s/Xeons than AMD. It is not that AMD could have killed Intel with Opteron, as much as Opteron allowed AMD to not flat out die.

As I clearly stated, AMD's problem has, for a long time, been one of manufacturing yields not design.
The much ballyhooed Core i7 that has put Intel squarely
back at the top of the heap features designs that AMD introduced with the Athlon 64, 6 years ago.
However, Intel has revived HyperThreading which, may just work, this time around.
Intel's manufacturing strength has always allowed them to throw more cache at the problem or go for the next die shrink, keeping their chips competitive and forcing AMD to play catch up, even when their design was superior.
Now, however, they are behind on all counts, except perhaps price/performance [/q]